


driving along, fall on your thorn

by elinadsy



Category: Skulduggery Pleasant - Derek Landy
Genre: F/M, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-09
Updated: 2018-09-09
Packaged: 2019-07-10 05:12:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,580
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15942479
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elinadsy/pseuds/elinadsy
Summary: Skulduggery Pleasant never quite expected he'd win a war just to get put behind a desk. It's going to take something unexpected to snap him out of this tedium he's grown into.Perhaps crashing his car will do.(Oneshot, The Mechanic!Val AU nobody asked for.)UPDATE 15/10/18: Leaving this as a one shot for now.





	driving along, fall on your thorn

Skulduggery Pleasant looks at the amount of paperwork on his desk and is horrified.

 He’s horrified by the size of it; the weight of it; even by the little scribbly handwriting that he knows belongs to McMillan from Accounts, who is undoubtedly demanding petrol receipts. And the Bentley, which consumes petrol like a drunk at a barmitzvah, has accumulated many a receipt in its time. Lots of receipts. Too many receipts.

 Briefly, he considers burning them. Perhaps on McMillan’s desk. Maybe he’ll toast some marshmallows on it, for the aesthetic. It’s a brief, happy little fantasy that brings him some small amount of joy until someone coughs in the next office over and snaps him back to his reality.

 His reality, these days, consists of a forty hour, office-based work week at the Sanctuary. And paperwork. A lot of paperwork. And really bad office radio, shockingly bad, is it such a wild idea that perhaps they could play some smooth jazz every now and then? If he has to hear  _Fletcher and the Renn’s_ latest new-pop hit again, he might have to smash the sigil-radio. Preferably over Ernie’s head, he thinks, as Ernie coughs again and then sneezes, the oaf, him and his goddamn allergies-

 “Morning, Skulduggery,” Saracen says.

 “Morning,” Skulduggery replies automatically. They both exchange a look of deepest loathing for the situation they find themselves in.

 Of all the Dead Men, Skulduggery and Saracen are the ones who pulled the short straws. Ghastly owns the most popular bespoke tailor service in Roarhaven; Dexter is the CEO of the tour company for sorcerers he and Anton co-own, and Corrival is retired.

 (They don’t talk about Erskine Ravel.)

 Meanwhile, Skulduggery and Saracen are police officers, in the loosest sense. Their high position in the Sanctuary’s force means they rarely step out from behind their desk. It also means that Saracen has a paunch these days, and Skulduggery is starting to wonder if he can get arthritis.

 “I should have partnered with Dex when he came to me with that business idea,” Saracen mutters, listlessly hanging around the entrance to Skulduggery’s office. “I could be in the Bahamas. I could be eating icecream… having a threesome…”

 “Yes, I’m sure Dexter would love that,” Skulduggery says dryly, trying to figure out where he’s meant to sign on this mess of a pile McMillan’s left for him.

 “The icecream? Or having the threesome with me?”

 “I assumed the icecream  _was_  the third participant,” Skulduggery says.

 “You’re not wrong,” Saracen admits.

 “Aren’t you meant to be in a meeting with the Elders?” Skulduggery reminds him, searching for a pen. Where are his pens? Who has been stealing his pens?

 “Probably,” Saracen sighs dramatically. “Do you reckon if I played hooky, they would mind?”

 “What’s the meeting for?”

 “The budget for the Cleaver upgrades.”

 “Did you even read the agenda?”

 Saracen looks shifty. “I may have glanced at the subject line in my emails.”

 Skulduggery nods. “And when is the meeting meant to start?”

 Saracen checks his watch. “Half an hour ago.”

 “Well, I’d say you’re  _already_  playing hooky, Saracen. You might as well go enjoy it.”

 “My thoughts exactly. I was thinking about stealing Ernie’s tissues-”

 “So we can have the joy of listening to him snort and sniffle even more than usual?”

 “-And replacing them with tissues scented with eucalyptus oil to clear his sinuses.”

 They both stare at each other for a few seconds.

 “I’m going to go light something on fire,” Saracen says suddenly. “That’s rebellious, right?”

 “Here,” Skulduggery says, pushing his paperwork towards him and standing up. “I’m going to go pretend I can piss so I don’t have to listen to the radio for a couple of minutes. If I come back and all of this is gone... I won’t say a word.”

 “God bless you,” Saracen says, and they both go their seperate ways.

 

-

 

The drive home is perhaps the best part of Skulduggery’s day. He takes the underground tunnel out of Roarhaven to the countryside home he bought long ago, just far enough away from everything and everyone that he can wander without his facade on in comfort. Sometimes, if he’s feeling quite bold, he undoes his top shirt button.

 He turns on some Sinatra, and it’s just him in the blessed silence of the Bentley and her beautiful engine for some twenty miles. A journey that is too short, because his joy at being no longer surrounded by go-getter Sanctuary wannabes is usually extinguished by how empty his house is.

 Well, not literally. His house has three bedrooms, a kitchen, a lounge room and two bathrooms. One bedroom has been turned into a study; the other into a library. The third he barely uses, preferring to do his meditation on the luxurious armchair he has in the lounge room. It’s tastefully decorated, clean, elegant, and devoid of any life whatsoever.

 Without the need to eat, he generally goes straight to his library, where he reads his Crystal among books he hasn’t touched in years, and once he finds his consciousness getting a little sleepy, he relocates to the lounge room and meditates until the alarm he sets beeps once, very loudly, and then he goes and picks out a new suit and back to the hell pit he goes.

 Sometimes this is broken up; occasionally he accompanies Saracen to a bar after work, where he sits with his facade on to avoid any glances, holding a drink he can’t taste. Other nights, he’ll visit Ghastly and chat while his friend weaves fabric.

 The weekends are a barren stretch of time. Sometimes he meditates through the entirety of it.

 (“Have you considered you might be depressed?” Ghastly had said to him once, mildly concerned when he asked how Skulduggery’s weekend had been and Skulduggery’s response had been “I meditated for fifty hours straight.”)

 Pulling into the driveway now is no different. He reads; he meditates; he comes back to work.

 “Do you miss it as well?” he asks Saracen one day.

 “Miss what?” Saracen replies around his morning enchilada.

 “The War.”

 A pause, leaden with understanding and sympathy.

 “More than I should,” Saracen says quietly, after he checks that no one can hear them.

 Skulduggery stares at the coffee Saracen is making, and in a distant sort of way, looks at the fabric covering his knuckles. He remembers when his gloves were red, when he felt something other than annoyance and apathy, when he didn’t hate his own reflection.

 Saracen stirs his coffee. “You know, Skulduggery,” he says hesitantly. “Maybe you should apply for holiday leave.”

 Skulduggery snorts. “And go where?”

 “I don’t know,” Saracen admits. “Somewhere that isn’t here.”

 “I don’t need a holiday,” Skulduggery says automatically. “I need change.”

 “Can’t help you there, bud,” Saracen says, and in an unusually on brand way, says it ruefully.

 

-

 

Driving to work the next day, he’s more absent minded than usual, the scenery flashing past him. He’s on auto-pilot, thinking to himself.

 Change. Easier said than done; look at Roarhaven, the sorcerer-city that took decades after the War to build and for what? Years and years of effort, and all of it so he could be stuck at a desk day in and day out. Sure, the sorceror population is safe and no longer spread thin among the mortals, but at least that would be  _interesting_.

 Should he get a hobby? What do people do these days? Is crocheting still a thing? The thought amuses him, as he goes to turn off onto the road that comes up near the Sanctuary office. Perhaps Ghastly can sell his little crochet creations. Perhaps flags, or something similarly ridiculous.  _Pleasant’s Pennants_ , he could call them. Little stupid oddities that tourists like, with crocheted messages like  _I HEART RH_  (with an actual heart, obviously), and  _My grand-uncle went to Roarhaven and all he got me was this lousy doily_.

 He laughs out loud then, and is distracted enough by his own wit that he doesn’t indicate on the turn off. This has the unfortunate consequence of his being hit by oncoming traffic, sending the Bentley smashing into the rising slope of the tunnel’s walls, and his head smacking into the steering wheel.

 For a second, all he can hear is the horn from the truck blaring, and the pain of his skull thudding through him, and then an emotion he hasn’t felt for some time emerges; fury. He capitulates on it, relishes in it.

 He kicks his crumpled door open, goes over to the truck and pulls the driver out, who is just as shocked as he is. There’s a lot of swearing, a lot of dribbled promises (from the truck driver, obviously). Skulduggery flashes his badge, extracts the idiot’s insurance details. He calls Roarhaven’s resident tow service, notifies the traffic controllers that there’s been an accident, and then makes several other calls to say, quite angrily, he’s going to be late to work and McMillan wouldn’t you be a  _dear_  and take care of that paperwork for me, there’s a lad, and by this stage the tow truck has arrived.

 He watches, fury simmering once more as he sees the Bentley in her crumpled elegance towed up and out into the city. His taxi pulls up only a minute later, and they follow the truck back to the mechanics. The driver, some idiot named Scapegrace according to his ID displayed in the front, makes some small-talk; Skulduggery declines to grace him with a response.

 A fantastic end to another fantastic week, he thinks to himself.

 He pays Mr. Scapegrace and gets out. He hasn’t been to this mechanic’s before; it was bought out by an English sorcerer a few months, he knows, but the Bentley’s yearly servicing isn’t due for another half a year; he has no idea who they are or if they’re any good. The new owner had better be extraordinarily competent, because Skulduggery’s fingers are itching for a pistol he doesn’t carry on him anymore.

 The front reception is nice enough, he supposes, full of pot plants and staffed by a blue haired woman who looks at him with the goggle eyed interest of the terminally bizarre.

 “Can I help you?” she asks dreamily, after he’s stood at the desk for over thirty painful seconds.

 “I’m the owner of the Bentley that was just towed in,” he says very patiently. “I’d like to speak to the mechanic working on it.”

 “Why?”

 “It’s very expensive, very precious, and has certain needs, certain quirks, that I would like to make sure the mechanic is aware of.”

 “What type of quirks?” the woman says interestedly. “Does it snore? Sing in the shower?”

 Skulduggery briefly considers kicking one of the pot plants into the wall.

 “Clarabelle,” another woman says with a strong English accent, leaning out from an office door nearby. “I thought we talked about you bringing customers straight through to the garage.”

 She looks very competent; strong arms beneath a tank top, with scarred dark skin and honey blond hair. However, she also doesn’t look like she’s the mechanic working on his car.

 “I’d like to speak to the mechanic working on my car,” he says, with as much patience as he can muster.

 The blond woman sighs as Clarabelle balances a pen on her nose. “That’ll be Val. Come on, I’ll lead you through.”

 She gets up, and he follows her to a door at the back.

 “Sorry about Clarabelle,” she says. “She’s not very… she’s… well, you saw how she is.”

 “I did, yes.”

 “I’m Tanith, by the way. I bought the business off old O’Reilly.”

 “Skulduggery.”

 Her eyebrows shoot towards her hairline as she leads him down a little hallway. “ _The_  Skulduggery?”

 “Unfortunately,” he grumbles.

 “Rest assured, Mr. Pleasant,” Tanith promises him, “I’ll make sure your car is treated with the utmost care.”

 “Good,” he tells her, as they come into the garage itself, the stink of metal and oil in the air. “Because, and I say this with no exaggeration, I may have to kill someone if my car is not fixed with respect, admiration, and perhaps a little bit of love.”

 “Love’s above my paygrade, unfortunately,” a woman says as they round a recently waxed Tesla and come to the wreck the Bentley has been reduced to. He can see boots sticking out from beneath the Bentley’s chassis on a little trolley.

 “Valkyrie Cain, this is Mr. Pleasant,” Tanith says.

 “Pull the other one, Tanith,” this Valkyrie says. “I would have thought he’d drive something a little flashier than this.”

 Skulduggery bristles. “This Bentley is a 1954, R-Type Continental-

“One of only 208 ever made,” Valkyrie says, her voice attractively deep and unconcerned, “With a six-cylinder, 4.5-litre engine, and you seem to have retro-fitted her with central locking, climate control, satellite navigation and a host of other modern conveniences.”

 If he had eyes, he would blink.

 She slides out from underneath the Bentley, long legs that seem to stretch on forever beneath her oil covered overalls, fulls lips and dark eyes with darker hair tied back into a messy bun and there’s some dirt smudged over her nose, a face full of wit and challenge and Skulduggery feels a very odd swooping sensation in his chest that he thinks, somewhat, distantly, should require a heart.

 “I  _am_  a mechanic, you know, Mr. Pleasant,” she says drily. “Cut me some slack.”

 She stands up, cracking her back. She’s tall, taller than Tanith, and she pulls off her thick gloves to open up her toolbox. She hasn’t even spared him a glance. “Now, it’ll take me about four days to fix her. The damage is extensive, and it’s fractured some sigil work you had put into the frame, so I’ll have to contract China Sorrows for that. If she’s too expensive, Darkly Studios is an option-”

 “Whoever you need,” he says hoarsely. Valkyrie does look at him then, a brow raised. He clears his throat. “I mean- for the car-”

 “I know what you meant,” she says, and a damning smile is ticking at her lips. She turns back to her tools, and he just watches her for a bit, watches her elegant, callused hands, how she puffs a little strand of hair out of her face, how her brows furrow as she searches for something.

 “Tanith, did you borrow my extender?” she asks.

 “No, it should be there,” Tanith says, and Valkyrie huffs, looks up.

 “Well I can’t find it.” She looks at Skulduggery, and seems surprised that he’s still there. “Mr. Pleasant, is there anything else I can help you with?”

 He shakes his head.

 “Well, go speak with Clarabelle. She’ll take your contact details, and we’ll ring you once the car’s fixed.”

 “In how long?” he asks.

 Valkyrie looks at Tanith. It’s a look that says,  _he’s not very bright, is he?_

 “Four days,” she says slowly.

 “Three,” he says.

 Valkyrie gives Tanith another look.

 “It will cost extra,” Tanith says. “We have other vehicles besides yours to tend to, Mr. Pleasant.”

 “I’ll pay it,” he tells them.

 “Well,” Tanith says. “Alright, then.”

 “I’ll see you in three days,” he says to Valkyrie, who looks amused.

 “Yep. See you then.”

 “Yes. In three days.” he waves away Tanith, who goes to walk him out, and he leaves, oddly buoyant.

 “He’s a few bones short of a ribcage, isn’t he?” he hears Valkyrie say, and that thing in his chest is full to bursting.

**Author's Note:**

> im back babey!!!
> 
> this is going to be a nice relaxed chill little slice of life fic... idk where we going.... idk what's gonna happen..... i got nothing planned and im writing as we go so lets have some FUN!!!
> 
> (updates won't be super regular, i'm currently studying overseas and am pretty busy!)
> 
> thanks for reading!!  
> -
> 
> UPDATE 15/10/18: on second thoughts, not feeling multi chapter for this one. No inspiration or nothin. So leaving this as a one shot for now that might be returned to sometime in the future. Apologies!


End file.
